Dan Carpenter: From Indy, why voting rights still matter

Jun. 25, 2013

Written by

Leon Riley

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Word had come down from the FBI that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was going to be assassinated that day in 1965.

It was decided that the six drivers of the latrine trucks for the voting rights march from Selma to the Alabama capitol in Montgomery would form a human shield around him as he was whisked from his car to the church where he would speak.

One of those men was a white, freshly minted Christian Church minister named Leon Riley, who would become pastor of a Northside Indianapolis church two decades later.

Hours later, he and a comrade were stopped and interrogated by the FBI along with a black man named Leroy Moton, to whom they had given a ride. Hours before that, Moton had been a passenger in a car driven by Viola Liuzzo, a white Selma marcher from Detroit who was shot to death from a passing vehicle in an incident that is widely considered the spark of the Voting Rights Act.

Riley and his friend were left to walk home at 1:30 a.m. He has never forgotten that feeling. He fears the nation has forgotten why we have the law that the U.S. Supreme Court defanged on Tuesday.

“I am appalled. I am just absolutely appalled,” said the 77-year-old retiree who shepherded the former Faith United Christian Church. “The price paid for seeing that the franchise was available for all, that price has been so high, so incredibly high. Most people would not know how many died. Who would know the name of Viola Liuzzo?”

Times have changed and so have the states and municipalities that were under special federal scrutiny based on past racist practices, the court’s 5-4 majority said. Riley’s side replies that discrimination has changed, rather than vanishing; and it has spread, through voter suppression schemes such as photo IDs and limited polling hours aimed at poor and minority citizens who tend to support Democrats.

“I feel a very intimate connection and a sense of outrage,” Riley said, “at a systematic effort in a multitude of ways to make voting more difficult. And the only verified case of fraud in (Hamilton) County involved our (Republican) secretary of state (the convicted and ousted Charlie White).”

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Tell William Groth about it. The Indianapolis attorney led the fight against Indiana’s voter ID law on the grounds of unfairness to minorities, the poor, the disabled and the elderly; only to see the law upheld by this same court. Such laws in Texas and South Carolina were knocked down, on the other hand, because the Voting Rights Act has them under a watch owing to the days of poll taxes and literacy tests.

In other words, burden on the people in Indiana, burden on the government in the South. “It makes a world of difference,” Groth said; and it appears Tuesday’s ruling lightens the burden for government all around when it is conceivable an expansive, voter-friendly court could have given every state the task of proving any new election laws were non-discriminatory.

“Ideally, it could be extended, if we could count on Congress to act responsibly,” said David Orentlicher, a professor Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney School of Law. “But this is such a politically charged issue that that’s not going to happen.”

Strictly speaking, the court majority said the law’s key provision of “pre-clearance” of voting changes with the Justice Department is OK — as long as Congress updates the circumstances and designates who is acting badly in this century, not in 1970. In practical reality, the Supreme Court’s nuanced decision is not a punt but rather a touchdown for voting restrictors.

Yet Congress has renewed the Voting Rights Act four times, most recently by passing a 25-year extension in 2006 despite the objections of Southern Republicans (Southern Democrats played that role in 1965). As Groth views it, the law’s opponents benefitted from the very kind of judicial overreach they love to pin on liberals.

“It is a radical decision on the part of the five so-called conservatives, in that they struck down another law passed by an elected body,” he said. “It’s the epitome of judicial activism.”